Friday, May 10, 2013

A Critique of Postcolonial Reason

by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Are the "culture wars"
over? When did they begin? What is their relationship to gender struggle
and the dynamics of class? In her first full treatment of postcolonial
studies, a field that she helped define, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, one
of the world's foremost literary theorists, poses these questions from
within the postcolonial enclave.

"We cannot merely continue to
act out the part of Caliban," Spivak writes; and her book is an attempt
to understand and describe a more responsible role for the postcolonial
critic. "A Critique of Postcolonial Reason" tracks the figure of the
"native informant" through various cultural practices--philosophy,
history, literature--to suggest that it emerges as the metropolitan
hybrid. The book addresses feminists, philosophers, critics, and
interventionist intellectuals, as they unite and divide. It ranges from
Kant's analytic of the sublime to child labor in Bangladesh. Throughout,
the notion of a Third World interloper as the pure victim of a
colonialist oppressor emerges as sharply suspect: the mud we sling at
certain seemingly overbearing ancestors such as Marx and Kant may be the
very ground we stand on.

A major critical work, Spivak's book
redefines and repositions the postcolonial critic, leading her through
transnational cultural studies into considerations of globality.